Sorry. Connection’s down

We all know it: Network connections are unreliable. This is ok and I have no problem whatsoever with that. Connections can go down. Nothing serious, nothing special.

There are multiple ways how software can let you know that a connection dropped:

Crash. This is the second worst way to handle it. At least the user knows what to do: Restart the application and it will (hopefully) work again.

Connection failed: Software caused the connection to abort. Somewhat incorrect, too much information, a bit scary for the enduser, but common for many Winsock-Applications as this is the default error-message you can ask windows to provide you with given a specific error-code

Sorry. The connection somehow went down. Should I try to connect again?. Correct, not technical, not scary. This is how I try to explain it to my users.